Review: Get great images for your ebook covers at DepositPhotos

Through the deals website AppSumo, I recently bought credits for 200 photos from the stock image supplier DepositPhotos. DepositPhotos is a stock image site offering photos and vector images for use in logos, ads, ebook covers, and more.

Here’s a little bit about my experience using them to illustrate blog posts like this one and make book covers like this one for my short story Mi Alma:

DepositPhotos is a great way to get affordable images, with lots of different payment options and pricing plans. You can pay for photos as you go, or prepay for a certain number of photo credits, then download on an as-needed basis. The bigger package you buy, the bigger the discount. You can get even bigger discounts by signing up for an account (it’s free) and checking your email for special offers. Occasionally they offer as many as 100 images of your choice for $100.

I’d like to see more interracial options in various age brackets—but to be honest that’s an issue with every stock photo site I run across. That’s why I ended up going with the leg shot for the book above—I just couldn’t find any good shots of a scrawny mid-twenties strawberry-blonde dude from Utah holding hands or kissing a late-twenties Afro-Dominican guy. But guess what? I couldn’t find that on any other stock photo sites, either.

DepositPhotos search function is sometimes great, and sometimes weird. For example, the “gay couple” search works exactly as expected, but the search “two men kissing” gets you a ton of heterosexual kisses. Change it to “two men gay kissing” and you fare much better. Since many stock photo sites carry the same images, some folks suggest using the more advanced image searches on Adobe Stock and Shutterstock to find what you want, then looking for that image on DepositPhotos using the artist’s name or the photo identification number.

Overall, I’ve been happy with DepositPhotos. Besides the plethora of gay images, I like that every photo comes with the guarantee of a model release (legal documents where the model gives permission for their image to be used). That means you can use the models’ faces without worrying you’ll get sued. Photos from free sites like Pixabay and Unsplash don’t come with that, so if you want to use those photos on a book cover you need to edit the faces out to be safe. (I did the covers for Pacific Rimming and Far from Home that way.)

I’d love to hear from you about your favorite stock photo sites and why. Do you like DepositPhotos? Is there another service you prefer? Who gives you the most bang for your buck? Better yet, where do you go to find the perfect image?

As always, the comments section is open.

P.S. If you use the links in this article to make a purchase from AppSumo or DepositPhotos, they’ll send me a few bucks that I use to help pay for the costs of running this blog.

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